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The Museum of the American Indian was founded by George Gustav Heye, a wealthy engineer and financier. Heye had collected more than 800,000 Indian objects since 1903 and established the Hey Foundation in 1916 and opened the Museum in 1922. In this study I has tried to relate Heye and the Museum to a larger historical context and to evaluate the Museum of American Indian as ‘a Colonial Museum.’ The late 19th century was the heyday of natural history and anthropology museums, and imperialism and colonialism brought to theses museums objects for study and exhibition in Europe as well as in America. Heye’s museum also modeled those anthropology museums, saying “its sole aim to gather and to preserve for students everything useful in illustrating... and to disseminate by means of its publications the knowledge thereby gained.” Add to these phenomena the 1890s had marked a turning point in the U. S. Indian policy from ‘removal and segregation’ to ‘assimilation’. This change in the policy brought along the assumption that the American Indians were vanishing and their culture was on the verge of extinction. This assumption eventually led Heye to the ‘collecting fever’ seeking out everything related to this ‘disappearing Indian.’ But Heye had little interest in contemporary Indians, it was their past that motivated him to collect. He seems to have embodied some of the larger society’s ambivalence toward American Indians at that time, simultaneously destroying and preserving Indian cultures.Therefore as a typical colonial museum, the Museum of American Indian can be said to be ‘the Museum of Others’, where collector(George Heye) exhibits Others’(Indians’) objects, without mentioning their societies drained of their essence, institutions undermined, land confiscated, religions smashed by white men. Heye made American Indian ‘things’ stuffed in the ‘frozen time.’